Windows 7

The improvements were on decreasing Memory, Disk I/O, Power consumption and on Increasing Speed (Faster Boot, Device Ready), Responsiveness (Start Menu) and Scale up to 250 Processors

BitLock on USB Drives to protect your data

Native VHD support to mount and boot

Remote Desktops now support Multi-Monitor, cool

Multi-touch, Start Bar UI improvements and more…

On seeing this I was initially disappointed to see no new UI or major changes. However, after using Windows 7 in the labs and attending more sessions, I realized Microsoft was not throwing what was done in Windows Vista, but improving on it, which is good.

The UAC improvements made me think why not introduce “Roles” like in Windows Server for Windows 7 (Client) also. This way “Developers”, “Power Users” and “Home Users” can have different settings and security prompts.

.NET 4.0

The idea to have the “Web” guy Scott Guthrie do the talk on Windows 7 developer improvements and on WPF was a “major coup” to promote it.

AutoCad was showing how they are using Windows 7 Multi-Touch, Ribbon APIs for their native C++ rendering

A new WPF Toolkit and Silverlight Toolkit were announced today

In .NET 4.0 you will have side by side hosting in the same process both .NET 4.0 and .NET 2.0 CLR

A new managed extension framework which was shown in VS2010 on how the Text Editor can be customized

VS 2010 is being rebuild on top of WPF, this I felt will certainly force Microsoft to improve the performance and invest more on WPF and make it better

Having JQuery (an Open source project) supported is another major coup within Microsoft

ASP.NET 4.0 will support multiple web.config, one each for Debug, Production and so on

Today Silverlight 1.0 is in over 25% of all machines in Internet and nearly in 100 million of them have Silverlight 2.0

Live Services

David Treadwell showed Live Services which consists of Search, Geospatial, Live ID, Communication & Presence and Directory services

Live ID will now support Open ID. This if works well, has the potential to make it come alive the dream of a single identity provider on the Internet

The demo of BBC Live Player using Live Mesh services to sync up was cool. The BBC Engineer talked that “Last Year Broadcaster decided what you saw, This Year you decide what you saw, Next Year will determine what you see”. What they are watching, which segment is good will all be shared using Social networking tools and powered by Live Mesh

Office “14”

This was perhaps the most interesting demo of the day, with a lightweight of office (Word, Excel and OneNote) for the Web

The cool thing was how it synced up in real-time changes done in Client version and the Online version. All working behind the scene with “REST” protocols